Applying chemical engineering concepts to non-thermal plasma reactors

Process scale-up remains a considerable challenge for environmental applications of non-thermal plasmas.Undersanding the impact of reactor hydrodynamics in the performance of the process is a key step to overcome this challenge.In this work,we apply chemical engineering concepts to analyse the impact that different non-thermal plasma reactor configurations and regimes,such as laminar or plug flow,may have on the reactor performance.We do this in the particular context of the removal of pollutants by non-thermal plasmas,for which a simplified model is available.We generalise this model to different reactor configurations and,under certain hypotheses,we show that a reactor in the laminar regime may have a behaviour significantly different from one in the plug flow regime,often assumed in the non-thermal plasma literature.On the other hand,we show that a packed-bed reactor behaves very similarly to one in the plug flow regime.Beyond those results,the reader will find in this work a quick introduction to chemical reaction engineering concepts.